About This Game
| Dicey Dangers, Living Wiki | Game by Joel Hills |
About This Game
I have been designing games since seventh grade. That year I built a Random Dungeon Generator on graph paper in Anchorage, Alaska, inspired by the D&D Basic Set I had just discovered. I still have it.
Over the decades that followed I started several more games. Smeared Ink, Atomic Sunset, Sands of Infinity, Living Adventure. Each one grew ambitious, each one reached a point where the interconnected systems became too complex to hold in my head alone, and each one quietly stopped.
Dicey Dangers nearly joined that list.
What saved it was structure: an Obsidian vault, a wiki, checklists, cross-linked pages. Tools that could hold the complexity I couldn't. For the first time a design of mine survived its own ambition.
The game you are holding draws from forty years of playing. The loot randomness comes from Might and Magic III, which I played in Portland in 1993. The dungeon generation comes from Four Against Darkness, which finally put pencil and graph paper back in my hands in 2019. The world feel comes from the B/X ruleset, the same one I learned in seventh grade, now republished as Old School Essentials.
Vulture's Vineyard is a real place, more or less. For twenty years I owned a lodge in a small mountain town called Strawberry. The floor plan, the locals, the characters who populate the town came from there. The people who worked for me and lived nearby became NPCs. The place became a winery haunted by something that may or may not be real.
Every unfinished project I ever started left something behind in this one. A character, a location, a story event. Dicey Dangers is where they all ended up.
I started this game the same year the world stopped. Playing alone, pencil and dice, a dungeon made of random tables. It turned out that was exactly the game I had always been trying to build.
I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I have enjoyed making it.
-- Joel Hills
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